The last time I was asked about my approach I was taking flying lessons and coming into Morristown airport a little too quickly. However, as my calm instructor said to me then, “It’s all about the flare.”
In recruiting, it’s more about the flair. Flair is often thought of as something “flashy.” In fact, it’s defined as a “talent” or an “instinct to make good use of something.”
You see, there are two schools of thought in recruiting. One holds executive search firms should hire recruiters and train them for a specific industry. Another holds that firms should hire industry experts and train them as recruiters. We definitely subscribe to the latter.
The bottom line is that if someone has walked in your shoes and has a keen understanding of your industry, they’ll know the questions to ask, the issues to discuss and the tactics to be wary of.
Our recruiters work the industries they cut their teeth in. Each Team Leader is an accomplished professional that felt it was time to get to the “other side of the table.”
Our instincts and training tell us when to “make good use of something” and that is where the flair comes in. We don’t spend our time going over and over the resume or looking on job boards. You can do that without us. We do, however, utilize more than sixty-five recruitment methods to recruit the very best candidates in each market. Shepherd has taken these practices from many other industries (such as college basketball, the military and culinary school to name a few) and applied them to talent acquisition. We talk to the family, we understand the motivation behind the relocation, we assess the career objectives and we verify every little detail.
Quite frankly, the vetting process at Shepherd is unlike any other in the industry. Let’s just say if we ran the Search Committee on behalf of the White House, both Dan Quayle (Republican and 44th VP) and Henry Wallace (Democrat and 33rd VP) never would have made it to the finals. Be assured, we are not partisan.
Our approach is unique. It’s thorough, it’s unique, it’s been fine-tuned and it explains our leading industry retention rate of 97.1%. We’ll take you through it to make sure you fully understand what’s involved because we all want a smooth landing.